Kim Young-ha Quotes

The magic question is, 'What for?' But art is not for anything. Art is the ultimate goal.

Art doesn't have to do anything. It just has to be there for the fierce pleasure we take in doing it.

Art for art's sake makes no more sense than gin for gin's sake.

Art for art's sake? I should think so, and more so than ever at the present time. It is the one orderly product which our middling race has produced. It is the cry of a thousand sentinels, the echo from a thousand labyrinths, it is the lighthouse which cannot be hidden. It is the best evidence we can have of our dignity.

Art is an end in itself; its values are intrinsic.

A work of art, so far as it is a work of art, cannot - whatever the artist's personal intention - advocate anything at all.

The most useful thing about art is it's uselessness.

I don't believe that artists really are interested in money. That's not the motivation for art.

Of what use were the arts if they were only the reproduction and the imitation of life?

All art is quite useless.

It is always understood as an expression of condemnation when anything in Literature or Art is said to be done for effect; and yet to produce an effect is the aim and end of both.

Art is not about objects of high monetary exchange. It's about reasserting our firsthand experience in present time.

The work of art may have a moral effect, but to demand moral purpose from the artist is to make him ruin his work.

Art needs no spur beyond itself.

Art for art's sake, and creation for creation's sake, and love for love's sake

In my low periods, I wondered what was the point of creating art. For whom? Are we animating God? Are we talking to ourselves? And what was the ultimate goal? To have one's work caged in art's great zoos - the Modern, the Met, the Louvre?

I guess that storytelling would be for me to keep making art that touches people in a way that nothing else can.

Art for art's sake is dead, if it ever lived.

One cannot demand of art that it pay you in any other way than in the satisfaction of the work itself.

I think that's what all art is for - for people to express what it is to be human. That's the purpose of it.

The arts teach and moralise by their beauty alone, not by translating a philosophical or social formula. For the truly artistic person, painting has itself as it's purpose, which is quite enough.

What we also need to have a discussion on the philosophy of art: so we must ask what is it that we want in the first place? Is it just about saying and doing whatever you want, or is it about something more? We should let the artist be free, but we must also question how exactly he deals with freedom. Is it arts for elevation or arts for destruction? Is there dignity in the process?

Fine art, that exists for itself alone, is art in a final state of impotence. If nobody, including the artist, acknowledges art as a means of knowing the world, then art is relegated to a kind of rumpus room of the mind and the irresponsibility of the artist and the irrelevance of art to actual living becomes part and parcel of the practice of art.

Art needs to stand for something.